Rewriting Darwin: The new non-genetic inheritance

HALF a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined his own theory of evolution. A cornerstone of this was the idea that characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime can be passed on to their offspring. In its day, Lamarck's theory was generally ignored or lampooned. Then came Darwin, and Gregor Mendel's discovery of genetics. In recent years, ideas along the lines of Richard Dawkins's concept of the "selfish gene" have come to dominate discussions about heritability, and with the exception of a brief surge of interest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "Lamarckism" has long been consigned to the theory junkyard.

Now all that is changing. No one is arguing that Lamarck got everything right, but over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that environmental factors, such as diet or stress, can have biological consequences that are ...

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